


The Walls Have Eyes

by ncfan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Gen, Genderbending, Loneliness, POV Female Character, Rule 63, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-06 06:22:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17934473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: What Doctor Fanshawe, in his anger, never disclosed to Jonah Magnus, was that he had not been alone in the operating theater when he had opened up the body of Albrecht von Closen.





	The Walls Have Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> One of the main premises of this fic was based out of the thought I had to myself: what if Gerry’s tattoos aren’t tattoos? I wanted to write something with that. As for the other main premise, the explanation is at the end.
> 
> [ **CN/TW** : Body horror, violence, burns]

What Doctor Fanshawe, in his anger, never disclosed to Jonah Magnus, was that he had not been alone in the operating theater when he had opened up the body of Albrecht von Closen and made his gruesome, fantastical discovery. The ancient tomb in the Schwartzwald sat on the farthest edge of property owned by the local landowner, and Doctor Fanshawe had been obliged to seek that landowner’s aid in procuring facilities.

Doctor Fanshawe was saddened, if not somewhat alarmed, by the revelation that this landowner was Albrecht’s own beloved nephew. While cursing anew the day he had ever met Jonah Magnus (he had to have known, he _had_ to have known), he grasped desperately for an explanation of just what they had been doing in that cemetery that would have satisfied Albrecht’s nephew. Surely Wilhelm von Closen knew that his uncle had been “indisposed,” even if he was not sensible as to the shape and the extent of his ailment. For a doctor to have allowed his obviously frail patient to have undertaken such an arduous journey… Well. To someone who did not know what he knew, it was something he would have a very difficult time _justifying_ , wouldn’t it be?

But to Doctor Fanshawe’s relief, Wilhelm von Closen had no interest in casting blame or pointing fingers. He looked from the doctor’s face to his uncles corpse, and shook his head resignedly. Without much emotion, Wilhelm told him, “I had been expecting this for a long time. My uncle’s passing is no great shock.”

Yes, of course Wilhelm would help Doctor Fanshawe obtain the use of proper facilities to conduct an autopsy. His only request was that he be present when the autopsy was performed.

There were things Doctor Fanshawe did not notice. He did not notice that there was not a single book in what was ostensibly Wilhelm’s library. He did not notice the way no one in the neighboring town would meet Wilhelm’s gaze, or just how few people in that town were willing to speak to him.

And, his own horror blinding him to anything but the dozens of eyes that stared out at him from Albrecht von Closen’s opened chest, Doctor Fanshawe did not notice the blank gaze of Wilhelm von Closen who stood opposite him, not surprised at all.

-0-0-0-

For Doctor Fanshawe, the whole affair ended with a furious letter penned to the man who had sealed Albrecht’s fate through his own cupidity. Over time, he discovered that that letter was only the genesis of his own worries, but his role in this particular tale ended with a cremation and a letter penned in Wilhelm von Closen’s empty library.

For the house of von Closen, it was far from over.

Albrecht von Closen was dead. His wife, Carlotta, had predeceased him by some years. They left orphaned two boys of ten years, and Wilhelm, remembering the good turn his uncle and aunt had done him long ago by raising him after he himself had been orphaned, took the boys into his own family. Family was family, after all, and he couldn’t just leave the boys to make their way through the world alone.

This did not pass without comment, nor without certain parties expressing concern for the boys’ well-being.

Wilhelm, you see, had developed a less than sterling reputation. He had, many years ago, left his estate with little notice to go traveling in Norway. He was seeking knowledge, he said. What knowledge he sought, and whether he found it, would never be known for certain—though the townspeople entertained certain suspicions. What is known is that he returned a year later a married man, bring home a Norwegian woman named Ylva to be the lady of his estate. The predictable crass jokes about the kind of knowledge Wilhelm had _really_ been after followed, but quickly dried up as Ylva established herself, to be replaced by something more uneasy.

The new wife was universally considered disreputable, though no one who regarded her as such was willing to elaborate on why this was. She spoke very little German, and was prone to staring when out and about in town. She was near-silent, and stared, and seemed to have very little interest in ingratiating herself with the matrons and housewives in town.

Wilhelm, meanwhile, had returned from Norway changed. He was just as sober and serious as he had ever been, but there was something different about him. Again, no one was willing to explain just what it was that was different, but the townspeople were never as warm in their estimations of Wilhelm as they used to be.

Strange lights could often be seen emanating from Wilhelm’s estate at night, glowing and pulsating in sickly shades of green and yellow and white.

When Wilhelm and Ylva’s children were born, none of the parents of the town wanted their children to have anything to do with them.

But Albrecht’s boys were more than happy to play with Wilhelm and Ylva’s children, and in time, there came the solution to a problem that had been troubling Wilhelm for some time. Of his three children, all were girls, and he did want his estate to remain within the von Closen line. When Albrecht’s younger son married Wilhelm’s oldest daughter, a tall, pale young woman named Sibylle, Wilhelm couldn’t be happier.

-0-0-0-

Something people rarely remember:

If you are born into a family that serves one of the Powers, it is not a guarantee that you will serve that Power yourself. Your family might _encourage_ you towards service, but ultimately, who you serve, if you serve anyone, depends on your inclinations, and your fears. However, strange inheritances, things carried in the blood with no input from the carrier, are hardly outside the realm of possibility.

-0-0-0-

Gerlinde was ten when the first eye appeared.

It was on her left knee, which was the only reason she noticed it so quickly. July of 1997 had been rather cool, but the sunlight was warm enough to let her wear shorts outside. Mum was busy in the bookshop—the man with the weird scar had shown up again—and Mum had told Gerlinde to go keep herself busy in Morden proper for a while, shoving a ten-pound note into her hand as she started for the stairs.

Seeing nothing else to do, Gerlinde had headed for the nearest playground; it was getting close to lunchtime, and there were a couple of food trucks that usually parked nearby. Oh, look; no queuing out by the food trucks today, and no competition on the swing sets or the climbing frame with its blue-painted bars mottled with rust. And sitting under the slide, chewing on an gyro heavily flecked with cool, numbing mint, cold, tart tzatziki dribbling down her hand, Gerlinde was torn between frustration and something close to relief that none of the other kids who liked to play at this playground were here today.

She didn’t go to school. Mum said she could teach her more than the teachers at the local schools ever could, and that Gerlinde didn’t have time to split between primary school and her true studies. She didn’t get to be around other kids very often; on top of not going to school with other kids, the kind of people her mother associated with very rarely had children in their company, and of those, Mum had forbidden Gerlinde to speak to them all.

Trips to the playground were the only real chance Gerlinde got to be around other kids, and she’d soon be too old to be there at all. Sometimes, she wanted to make friends. Never did the other kids particularly want to make friends with her.

It had to do with her quiet, her staring. They never said it, but Gerlinde just knew. They weren’t very good at hiding it. She was creepy, or so they thought. They didn’t know they were never alone. They didn’t know that they were always being watched. They didn’t know that there wasn’t a single place on the face of the earth they could go where the Eye couldn’t see them, couldn’t drink in all of their secrets. Someone ought to tell them. Someone ought to warn them that they always had to be careful what they did, lest they did something worth drawing the Eye’s closer attention.

That someone wasn’t going to be her. She was just a creepy, weird-looking kid, after all; looked more like a ghost than a person.

Whatever. (The lamb in the center of the gyro was piping hot; Gerlinde’s eyes watered.) They were all boring, anyways. None of them knew anything worth knowing. None of them had seen anything worth seeing. Sometimes, in sight of Gerlinde’s eyes, they seemed less like living kids and more like paper dolls being bounced around by unseen hands. There just didn’t seem to be anything going _on_ in their heads.

And they thought she was the weird one.

(The playground was colder when she was alone.)

Whatever.

Gerlinde finished her gyro with a few last, somewhat difficult gulps (Should’ve bought a drink). She doodled in the sand, sighing to herself. She was trying—and failing; it was hard to hold the image in her head—to draw someone who’d come to speak with her mother a few weeks back. It was a man, a man who had looked like a normal human, but she couldn’t remember anything more than that.

Clouds painted a dingy off-white, veined a darker, angrier gray, were starting to gather overhead, and as they passed over the sun, all the warmth of early afternoon was extinguished, and Gerlinde felt cold.

Mum would be done with her appointment soon. The knowledge tugged at the edge of her mind. If it wasn’t supernatural revelation, it was at least an insight—the man with the scar didn’t like clouds; she’d seen him get tense and terse whenever it started to get overcast while he was in the shop (Which was every time he’d visited, when Gerlinde stopped to think about it). Mum would be mad if she stayed out too long. Gerlinde crawled out from under the slide, brushed the sand from her legs, threw away her tzatziki-streaked food wrapper, and left.

It was as she was walking home that Gerlinde first spotted the eye. She didn’t like to look anywhere near the windows of the buildings she passed, didn’t want to know if there was someone standing in a window, looking down at her. She kept her eyes on the buckling, splintered, crumbling sidewalk, and as she was doing so, Gerlinde Keay noticed something black on her knee. She stopped, frowning.

Her first thought was a bruise, but that didn’t make any sense; her knee wasn’t sore, and she hadn’t tripped recently. Gerlinde sat on a bench to get a closer look, and that was when she saw the shape of the thing, saw the motionless black pupil staring back at her.

 _Did I sit on a sticker?_ Gingerly, Gerlinde reached down to pick at the eye, hopeful that a sticker was all it was, though wouldn’t there have been grains of sand visible under the adhesive if it had been?

Her fingernail scraped against skin only. The neat, almost blocky lines of the eye were slightly warmer than the cool, almost chilled skin around it. Just a basic design, really; a sharp-edged oval and a ink-black pupil contained therein. Though that pupil didn’t dilate, didn’t swivel towards her or shy away from the touch of her hand, Gerlinde felt as though the eye was looking at her.

She prodded at it curiously, expecting it to blink and squeeze itself shut in pain, but still, it remained stationary, seemingly insensate. It was as if it had been painted on her skin while she was looking away, but really, Gerlinde could feel no difference in texture to indicate that it was anything _but_ her skin, suddenly tinted black.

Mum was gonna be _really_ mad if she didn’t get home soon, and in her haste to make up for the time she’d lost, Gerlinde was nearly halfway home before it occurred to her to be worried.

Mum was waiting for her with a frown twisting on her lips, ready to break into scolding, but her eyes lit up when Gerlinde pointed to her knee, and Mum got a good look at what was looking at her.

Lit up. Filled with light. That was the term for it, Gerlinde supposed; Mum’s eyes went bright and sharp and searching. Gerlinde knew most people used that term, ‘lit up’, to speak of happiness, but there was an odd mix of emotions swirling in her wrinkled face as she fixed her gaze on the eye that had appeared on Gerlinde’s knee. She didn’t know what to make of it. She never would know just what she was supposed to make of it.

“This is unexpected.” Mum’s hand, veins showing blue and prominent in the dim light of her study, was as clammy as if she’d been keeping it in the fridge as she pressed against Gerlinde’s knee. She made a small humming noise in the back of her throat. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d start to get them for a few more years, at least.” She stood abruptly. “Oh, well. Different people develop at different rates, and you’ve always been quite a curious child.”

And with that, Mum went back to sit at her desk, letting out a sharp, whistling sigh as she turned her attention to the stack of papers that had been piling up for the past few days. Like the eye that had suddenly appeared on Gerlinde’s knee wasn’t something of any level of importance.

Stepping away from her had been a dismissal; Gerlinde knew one when she saw one. The part of her that wanted to heed the dismissal, head back to her own room where she could be alone with her books and her pencils and her thoughts found itself battered into silence by the part of herself that demanded answers. Gerlinde took a step forward, then another, then another, until she was close enough to lay her hands flat on her mother’s desk and look frowningly into her face at close range. “Mum, what is it?”

A hard plastic pen with a metal tip made a sharp tapping noise as Mum scowled down at the piece of paper in front of her. “A family inheritance.”

“What kind of inheritance?”

Gerlinde braced herself for a snapped out “I need to work” or something similar, but instead Mum put down her pen and pushed the slip of paper aside with something close to gratitude. “Hmm.” She tapped her finger against her lip, her clear nail polish glinting in the weak light. “I’ve told you something of our family tree, but not this. I really _did_ think it would be a few years yet before they started to appear. Oh, well; such is life. Take a seat, and I’ll tell you.”

Oh, a story. With decidedly greater eagerness, Gerlinde went to sit on the wooden stool by the window (She did drag it away from the window first, though). Just be quiet; Mum would really rather any questions be saved until the _end_ of the story.

“My grandfather—“ Mum’s lip curled “—must have been nearly the most worthless man ever to walk the earth, though your own grandfather comes close to topping him. He had less than no interest in maintaining the dignity of his own family, in the sense of either reputation or money. He spent profligately, and shunned knowledge of all kinds in favor of drinking himself into an early grave—which reminds me,” she said with a suddenly glare, “if I ever catch you drinking, I will waste no time in drying you out.”

Gerlinde picked at the back of her hand. “I won’t.”

“Hmm. My grandfather will be remembered for nothing more than bankrupting himself and drinking himself into the void, but this was unfortunately just the culmination of a trend that had been building over the past few generations.

“There are two men I could really call the progenitors of our line, though the family didn’t _start_ with them. Wilhelm von Closen was the more active of the two; he was the one who _really_ plunged the family into the world we inhabit today. His children honored what he had taught him, but after them, it was all downhill, until we finally got to my worthless grandfather, the worst of the lot.”

What exactly this had to do with the eye on her knee, Gerlinde wasn’t certain. But Mum had said things like this to her before, and she always got back on-topic eventually.

“The fool thought that everything would be just fine without his involvement,” Mother went on, her lip curled in a snarl, “and instead, everything fell to ruin thanks to his extravagance.” She shook her head, drummed her fingertips against her narrow chin. “Ah, to be one of the idle rich.

“Our family arrived in London destitute, and my mother was raised ignorant of her own history. She did not discover the truth until much later. In fact—“ her, Mum’s eyes flashed with something Gerlinde couldn’t identify “—she didn’t discover the truth until she went to work for the Magnus Institute.”

Gerlinde bit back a sight at the mention of the Magnus Institute. There were two words she’d heard out of her mother’s mouth a lot. Just judging from all of the things Mum had said about the Magnus Institute, Gerlinde couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be some twisted hive of terror… or just _really_ boring. It seemed to vary from day to day, just as Mum’s attitude towards it veered between respect and contempt. Maybe, one day, Gerlinde would figure out why that was. She’d certainly like to put that small mystery to bed.

“Not long after my mother learned the truth of her family and the truth of her workplace, who it was she _truly_ served, she got her first eye.”

And at that, Gerlinde’s eyes, formerly drifting around the dusty floor, snapped back to her mother’s face.

Mercifully, Mum didn’t seem to have noticed her earlier wandering attention. “I was just before I was born. An eye appeared on her skin, dark and flat like a tattoo, just over her heart. My father—“ Mum’s lip curled “—couldn’t see it, but afterwards he often complained of feeling watched. That feeling only grew stronger as time wore on; I remember when I was a child, before he cut his throat, how he would check the locks on our doors and the latches on our windows over and over again, sometimes more than a dozen times in a single night.

“I myself got my first eye just before I went to work for the Magnus Institute.” Mum’s mouth turned in a lopsided smile. “My mother was so pleased; she thought it meant that my allegiance to our patron would be strong, and be rewarded.” A soft, almost bitter laugh. “If only she knew.”

Finally, the questions that had been boiling in the back of Gerlinde’s throat boiled over, in spite of Mum’s hatred of being interrupted. “What _are_ they?” Her voice pitched a little higher, cracked just a little. “Am I gonna get more?”

Mum adjusted the lapels of her rose-red blazer, smiling thinly down at her. “There are worse things that could happen to you.”

-0-0-0-

It was some time later, after Gerlinde had grown somewhat accustomed to the eye on her left knee (and was trying to get used to the eye on her right elbow), that she learned more about what her mother considered the source of this particular "family trait.”

Though personally, Gerlinde was starting to think of it more in terms of a family curse.

The story, when told in full, did explain some things.

“So Jonah Magnus betrayed Albrecht.”

Mum waved a hand dismissively. The faint light of an autumn afternoon caught and practically shone through her thin, translucent skin. “Albrecht von Closen lacked vision—quite ironic, really. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was his blood that led our forbearers to become as apathetic as they were. Certainly, Wilhelm and _his_ children were more proactive by far. The man didn’t appreciate what gifts he had been given, and he paid the price for it.”

Gerlinde rubbed her elbow, trying not to be uneasy, though her heart beat a little faster, regardless. It sounded like a betrayal to her. Maybe Albrecht would have died regardless; Gerlinde couldn’t imagine that the Beholding would have been _happy_ that one of its avatars was rejecting knowledge, especially as dramatically as Albrecht had done. But the books were blank. They were _all_ blank. And who even knew what Jonah Magnus had done with them, for Mum had never found them when she worked in the Institute, either in Artifact Storage or in the historical section of the Archive. They’d dropped off the face of the earth.

Had they been like… like— _that_ book, like the books that bore Leitner’s seal? Were they just books filled with true stories, like the statements in the Institute, and Albrecht responded to them as he did because the Beholding had claimed him as far back as his first excursion to the tomb? If they were Leitners— _“I do not read the books; they read me_ ”—it would explain much. Gerlinde thought of Mum, thought of her hungers, myriad as they were, how they all seemed to come back to the knowledge gleaned from new experiences, one way or another. She thought of her mother, always keeping an eye out for the books that served as—No one quite knew what they were. Mum said it was pointless to speculate. They were vessels, and could teach you much, if you knew how to handle them properly.

Or so Mum said, anyways.

“The books were dangerous,” Gerlinde tried cautiously, watching her mother’s back as she retreated towards one of the backrooms in their combined shop and home.

“The books were _power_ ,” Mum fired back, without ever looking behind her. “And Albrecht von Closen was a fool to reject them, when he could have become powerful in his own right thanks to the knowledge they imparted on him. Imagine it, Gerlinde, to come upon a fount of knowledge such as that, and try to consign it to a crumbling tomb in the Black Forest? Small wonder the Beholding struck him down!”

Mum… It wasn’t quite slamming, what she did with the door, but the firm, sharp way it shut did not exactly imply friendliness. Gerlinde knew not to follow her, certainly.

She could stare at the door in peace, though, a retort scratching on walls of her throat with claws narrow and keen.

Power was what Mary Keay cared about, though, and not Gerlinde’s retorts, so there wasn’t any use even in shouting through a shut door.

Had the skin book been among the collection found in the tomb? Gerlinde couldn’t imagine how that would be, since all the books had been fairly _normal_ -looking, aside from the advanced age and the mold—they would have had to have been, for Jonah Magnus to have swapped them all out at a _bookbinder’s_ shop and Albrecht von Closen not to have noticed a thing. It would have been a fitting resting place for it, on more than one level, but Gerlinde had the sinking feeling, just from its incredible mass, that it had been out in the world and in active use when Albrecht von Closen was first harvesting the books from that tomb in the Black Forest.

Eyes…

Eyes.

Was it better for her, that Gerlinde was getting eyes on the exterior of her body, rather than within? Was it better that they took the appearance of tattoos, as opposed to actual eyes? She scratched at her elbow with uneven fingernails. She kept waiting to feel something there blink, but the eye was, as ever, stationary.

If someone cut her open, would they find her internal organs carpeted with eyes?

That night, while Gerlinde tried to sleep, she was kept awake by the idea that if she concentrated hard enough, she’d be able to feel internals eyes blinking and wincing in pain every time she shifted her weight.

Something she noticed later: the way Mum never showed her any of the “tattooed” eyes she had on her own body. The way Mum never told her how many there were, never spoke of them if she could help it. The way Mum always wore clothing that covered most of her body.

Something she noticed much later: That her mother, having transformed herself into a specter of death, had no eyes anywhere on her body except in her eye sockets.

-0-0-0-

The eyes that had appeared on her body, that _kept_ appearing on her body, they had their uses. Gerlinde had never argued that much. They could see things her own eyes couldn’t, even when covered with clothing, even in pitch black.

That was useful, when she was sprinting down a network of tunnels under Pall Mall and clutching a slender book to her chest, a weak ( _stolen_ ) flashlight in her free hand and no idea of how the _hell_ she was gonna get out of here without being caught by the workmen she’d come across in the basement. All this just to make Mum happy for all of ten minutes, and not even with _her,_ and the man who’d chased after her had— _(It’s not my fault_.)

She was back in the central chamber, she was alone, and she had no idea of which way to go. All she knew was that if she chose the wrong tunnel to travel, there was a very good chance she wouldn’t be bringing this book back to Mum. There was a good chance she wouldn’t be heading back to Mum at all.

And then her skin began to prickle, and then her eyes traveled to one of the tunnels in particular, not as dark as some of the others, and as she stared into it, she realized she could see something.

At first, Gerlinde thought they were stars, stars of every hue imaginable.

After a few moments, she realized they were eyes.

Clutching the book tighter, Gerlinde gritted her teeth, took a sharp breath through her nose. Her heart was juddering in her throat, loud as a freight train, but she could still hear the pounding of footsteps over it.

She ran down the tunnel, and no matter how she tried to avoid it, she couldn’t avoid the gaze of the eyes that lined every inch of the walls.

Gerlinde didn’t want to talk about what happened next.

She got out in the end.

Had three new eyes to show for it, two over her knuckles, and one on the back of her neck. Mum made an off-color joke about “eyes in the back of your head,” and it was three days before Gerlinde could sleep again.

-0-0-0-

The eyes had their uses, but they were best for showing Gerlinde things she didn’t want to see.

She didn’t have such a great time in jail. That was to be expected, considering the crime she’d been accused of was murdering and partially flaying her own mother. Given what she’d been accused of, it was to be expected that she wasn’t going to have such a great time in jail. The guards thought she was the scum of the earth, she could see it in their eyes whenever they looked at her. The other prisoners… _also_ thought she was the scum of the earth, which was a real laugh given some of the things _they’d_ done. (The judge didn’t even bother to ask what had happened when she showed up in court with her arm in a cast and a face like raw hamburger.)

It was in jail that Gerlinde really came to notice that not everyone could see her extra eyes.

Logically, she’d known that not everyone could see the eyes. It was very much at random, didn’t depend on whether someone had had previous exposure to the world of the paranormal and the esoteric. Just… Some people could see the eyes—some of the women in jail with her sneered about the wannabe witch’s creepy tattoos. Some people couldn’t see them, and frowned in confusion when someone else brought them up.

The people who could see Gerlinde’s extra eyes, she could see right _into_ them. She could see everything they’d done, whether she wanted to or not. The crimes of the guilty squirmed around in her brain at night like a hundred parasitic worms. The terror of the innocent beat against her skull like sledgehammers. And past it all were the thoughts of the guards, the steady drone of contempt and wariness and boredom.

The people who couldn’t see the eyes? They started to complain about being watched at night. Some of them snarled about the cameras in their cells, demanding the guards tell them where the “hidden” cameras were, the ones they insisted the guards had installed while they were in the cafeteria or the showers. Gerlinde watched a couple of the women in the ells near her own practically tear their cells apart looking for the “hidden cameras,” while sweat dripped down their faces, sour with fear.

Others complained of feeling watched. Not by cameras, though: just watched. They suspected every possible source besides the cameras: the guards, their fellow prisoners, rats in the walls, cracks in the ceiling. These were the ones who sometimes let out a wail at lights out. They weren’t alone in screaming in their sleep.

And the guards were growing more agitated and hypervigilant by the hour. Clutching their batons tighter, eyeing the prisoners with wary, distrustful eyes. Positioning themselves at just the right spots in the cafeteria to hear all the prime jailhouse gossip. Constantly looked over their shoulders as they made their rounds.

She couldn’t turn it off—the knowing, or the miasma of paranoid fear that seemed to seep from the stationary, unblinking eyes that dotted her body. She tried, you know. Not making eye contact wasn’t exactly something that came to Gerlinde with difficulty; even at the best of times, she didn’t like it. It didn’t help. If anything, it seemed to make things worse. Gerlinde lied back on her cot, squeezed her actual eyes shut, and desperately willed it to stop. She wasn’t Mum ( _It’s not my fault_ ). She didn’t get off on people being afraid because of her, she didn’t want it—

Gerlinde got up, to find in the mirror an inch or so more of her white blonde hair showing from under fading hair dye than it had the last time she’d looked in the mirror, bags under steel gray eyes visible even past the bruising, a fresh cut on her forehead, and three new eyes on her right hand.

Then, her stomach lurched, and she took a perverse sort of pleasure in not listening to her neighbors’ complaints as she threw up dinner into the scratched and rusting toilet.

-0-0-0-

And outside jail, freedom was in short supply.

Whatever it was the hospital had given her for the burns, it must have been strong. With Molina gone and Desolation-induced crisis averted, the Beholding wasn’t doing the eldritch equivalent of prodding Gerlinde into wakefulness every thirty seconds, and she could actually rest. Sort of. Her nostrils constantly prickled with the astringent, sickly smell of antiseptic, and it never got properly dark in her room, but the pain meds she’d been given blocked most of the pain from the burns (she tried not to watch, tried not to look at her body when they changed the bandages, but even with her eyes screwed shut, all her other eyes were wide open), and she could just spend most of her time floating around in almost-content semi-consciousness.

From far away, she heard the puzzled, “I still don’t understand how tattoos this small could survive burns like this.”

With some difficulty, Gerlinde opened her eyes (the ones that belonged to her), and the sight before her changed not at all: the dark eyes and puzzled frown of the nurse, the witness.

“Not tattoos,” she slurred, wishing her vision would blur like it was supposed to when someone was exhausted, high on pain meds, and covered in second-degree burns. The lights alone were too bright, and the nurse’s crisp outlines were like knives on her eyes.

“Oh, so you’re awake?” Gerlinde remembered that mix of emotions from the first night, when it was her and the witness pitted against the Lightless Flame. The wonder, edged with worn-down exhaustion, tainted with fear.

In response, Gerlinde’s eyes fell shut, and the others watched for her as the nurse hovered over her bed a while longer, before walking away, and the movement was like the flow of water over a waterfall.

She just wanted to sleep. The eyes wouldn’t stop watching, because this was a hospital and there were so many things to _see_. She wanted to sleep.

-0-0-0-

Chicago winters were hell. Whenever Gerlinde had heard the city mentioned, that had managed to come up somehow: Chicago winters were hell on earth. Gerlinde had always dismissed the opinion out of hand, especially once she had learned of the rituals the Powers could carry out. _They_ could wreak hell on earth, and nothing short of that could possibly qualify. On top of that, Gerlinde had never been in Chicago during the winter.

But since she was now, she was starting to understand what everyone had meant.

Gerlinde rolled her stiff shoulders (always stiff these days, stiff with scar tissue and lack of sleep) as she kicked the worryingly flimsy door shut behind her. “Don’t bother going out,” she muttered. Grocery bags were dropped gracelessly onto the faux-granite counter, before Gerlinde went into the tiny bathroom to shake the snow on her coat into the bathtub. “It’s fucking freezing and they’re still trying to clear all the snow from the roads. I got us food for a few days, by the way.”

Gertrude didn’t look up from her laptop. “That’s fine.” A few taps of the keys. “I wanted to do more research, anyways.”

Which meant that Gertrude would be poring over her computer the whole time, while she shooed Gerlinde back out into the frozen hell that was Chicago, so she could head off to the nearby library to do research of her own. Sure, let’s go with that. Just have as little interaction as possible; let’s do that.

As far as Gerlinde could see, there wasn’t actually anything she could do to dissuade her traveling companion. So—fine.

Gertrude looked at her out of the corner of her eye (gray, like Gerlinde’s, if much paler; maybe that was why the man they’d rented this flat from had believed Gertrude when she said they were mother and daughter, for they bore little resemblance to one another otherwise), and her gaze traveled inexorably to Gerlinde’s hands, lips thinning.

Just before they had started to work together, after Gertrude had brought Gerlinde back the skin book with the last pages mangled and burned, she’d had one request, and one only. When Gerlinde, who wore concealing clothing to start with, was out anywhere someone relevant to their search might see her, she _had_ to wear gloves over her hands.

As little as Gerlinde liked wearing gloves in the hot months (even the staring she got thanks to the swirling pink patches of scar tissue was preferred to the sticky feeling of sweat seeping into the lining of leather gloves), it hadn’t been an unreasonable request. Someone wouldn’t have needed to know exactly what the eyes were to look at them and immediately guess where Gerlinde’s “allegiances” lied—which, given what she and Gertrude were trying to accomplish out here, could potentially have been ruinous.

Lately, it didn’t seem to be just gloves while out and about that Gertrude wanted. Gertrude’s eyes locked with the unblinking eyes staring back at her from Gerlinde’s hands, and even if Gertrude’s mind was difficult for Gerlinde to (unwillingly) see, she could guess at what dwelled there.

Gerlinde smiled thinly down at her. “You know clothing doesn’t do anything to stop them seeing, don’t you?”

“Yes, you’ve told me before.” Gertrude’s thinned lips quirked in a frown, though, as she crossed her arms over her chest. “You told me your mother and grandmother had them, too?”

“Again, yes.” Gerlinde dug a bag of crisps—sour cream and onion, not her favorite, but the convenience store had almost been out, and the only alternatives were plain and vinegar-flavored—and sat down at the chair opposite Gertrude. “Mum never told you?”

Mum and Gertrude had had _history_. Gerlinde didn’t need to be told or to see it in Gertrude’s mind to know as much. Their time at the Institute had overlapped, and Gerlinde had seen them together a couple of times when she was a kid. There had always been something taut and charged between them, like a metal wand full of built-up electricity, waiting to discharge and electrocute someone.

Gertrude’s gaze drifted down, back to her laptop screen. “No,” she said, and her tone hinted at nothing at all that Gerlinde could have used. “Mary liked her secrets. She thought them to be power, and she was never one to willingly part with power.” Gertrude looked to the side, mouth twisted in something close to a grimace. “Certainly not when I knew her.”

Gerlinde snorted. “Not when I knew her, either.”

Silence often reigned between them, when they had nothing in particular to talk about. Gerlinde was no great conversationalist, and Gertrude preferred to keep her own counsel. They weren’t mother and daughter, and they weren’t friends. They were a team out to stop the end of the world, and they didn’t have a lot to say to one another outside of that. Gerlinde didn’t think Gertrude really wanted to talk to her at all. Gertrude didn’t look at her face too often.

The wind battered against the exterior wall of their rented flat. The heating unit was utterly unequal to the task of dealing with a Chicago winter, especially one of this severity, and even having slung her coat over the shower rod, Gerlinde had put her lighter leather coat back on immediately afterwards. It did little to keep out the chill. Gertrude, of course, wore only a thin cardigan over her regular clothes.

“Gertrude.”

She didn’t look up, but her iron gray eyebrows lifted, as much acknowledgment as Gerlinde could expect when she was reading.

“Gertrude, after the Watcher’s Crown has been disrupted, do you think—“ Gerlinde picked at one of her knuckles, her black nail polish glinting in the fluorescent light “—do you think the eyes will disappear?”

Gertrude looked at her, then. For a moment, her face was unguarded, and she looked as close to troubled as Gerlinde had ever seen her. “I’m not certain,” she admitted, after recovering her composure. “The Beholding won’t be destroyed, but it will certainly have been weakened. There is a chance that its hold on you will loosen enough for the eyes to vanish.”

Or perhaps she would simply do as Albrecht von Closen had done, and fall down dead. Still, Gerlinde knew how difficult sentiment was for Gertrude. She appreciated the attempt.

**Author's Note:**

> The genderbending was because the idea had been poking my brain for a while, and I wanted to do something with it. It’s an AU I’m quite fond of, and I wanted to write at least one fic for it. As for my choice of name, I go with the theory that Mary named Gerry, at least partially, for Gertrude. In that case, when I went to pick a name for fem!Gerry, I was looking for a Germanic name with the ‘Ger-‘ prefix. And yeah, I know ‘Gerarda’ is a real name that I could have used, but it felt lazy. Thus, ‘Gerlinde.’


End file.
